The defining moment of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy to date – the moment that gave birth to all the others – was a ride on an escalator in a tower he designed during a television appearance he staged to build on the wish-fulfillment empire he had created.

The defining moment for Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate to date – the moment that gave birth to all the others – was when a British pop star she had never met, in a post over which she had no control, referenced an album she did not know, using a term she was unfamiliar with.

The presidential campaign is about many things: globalism vs. nativism, feminism vs. machismo, wokeness vs. muscism, positivity vs. fear, and, oh yeah, competing views on climate, abortion, and immigration. But it’s also about something else: radically different philosophies of communication.

With Trump, the Republicans have a classic form of sensationalism at their disposal: the stories are trimmed for maximum entertainment, directed by an author and brought to the masses with a series of targeted goals.

With Harris, the Democrats have a sharp, contemporary style in which an army of people far removed from politics craft messages that are then channeled through the campaign, which often acts as a reactive subject of history rather than its shepherd.

Let’s call it reality TV ringleader versus the TikTok ticket.

“What we are seeing is essentially a laboratory experiment with two different approaches to the media,” said Bob Thompson, a longtime professor at Syracuse University and observer of our communications culture, when contacted about the issue last week.

This is true even on the down-ticket side. JD Vance got where he is today thanks to a literary bestseller, the archetype of the top-down message. Tim Walz rose because groups of online users decided to support him after watching several of his videos. (Though he partly engineered his rise himself; he’s still a politician.)

Meme culture has a kind of feedback dynamic in the election campaign. Fans spontaneously spread a message that is then picked up and guided by the campaign. One example is Swifties for Kamala, a group formed by Gen Z fans who have no affiliation with the star or the candidate. In just a few weeks, the group amassed 34,000 followers on Instagram, produced a slew of TikTok remixes (if you’ve ever wanted to hear political speeches sampled in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me,” this is your chance), and resulted in at least two phone calls with the campaign—after which the Swifties went out to spread the message further.

Three weeks ago, there was also Charli XCX’s now-famous “Kamala IS Brat” post, an “I Like Ike” post to the great-grandchildren. Although the post was not commissioned by Harris, the campaign quickly jumped on it by changing her social backgrounds to reflect the new frenzy reality. Why order a campaign bus when you can drive hot through the streets on a different frequency?

The characters in this formula are less fleshed out than crowdsourced. Harris’s most famous line, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” is tellingly an excerpt from a 2023 speech in which she quoted someone else. And yet it has become one of the most famous statements by a presidential candidate in recent memory, thanks to a plethora of people who praised him so highly—and then tasked themselves with spreading the message via a wave of dance remixes, lime green T-shirts, and coconut emojis.

The idea of ​​an online army of pop stan agents stands in stark contrast to Harris’ opponent.

Trump himself was once a novel user of social media, defining his candidacy (and later his presidency) through tweets he sent at all hours of the night. But even these had a decidedly old-fashioned feel, staging episodes of drama programmed by a man like an impulsive network executive. Even his own people often didn’t know what to expect.

The centrality of this approach to his electoral success was underscored on Friday when a new paper by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University concluded that Trump’s performance on The Apprentice enabled his victory in 2016. His portrayal as “‘America’s boss’ – a successful businessman, a savvy negotiator, a tough but supportive mentor who knows how to close lucrative deals even in high-pressure situations” was what “improved Donald Trump’s electoral victory in the 2016 Republican primaries,” wrote the American Political Science Review.

Trump’s approach was to create a personality that he then had a firm grip on. As the first apprentice Producer Bill Pruitt wrote in a detailed exposé about slate In May, the series did nothing less than invent and introduce a franchise character.

“On the show, he seemed to demonstrate impeccable business acumen and unprecedented wealth, even though his companies had barely survived multiple bankruptcies,” Pruitt wrote. After landing the role of a lifetime, Trump honed it and played it on the world’s biggest stages.

Trump’s transition to newer media has been less smooth. Last week, he gave a livestreamed interview with right-wing gamer Adin Ross on the video game platform Kick at Mar-a-Lago, which included awkward moments, such as when Ross showed him how to use the chat function. Far from making Trump seem younger, the contrast with a 23-year-old influencer made him seem even older, which led to some laughing comments from the gaming community.

“In some ways, Trump is trying to show off with these appearances. It’s really hard, and I’m not sure he should do it,” said Liz Stahl, founder of Los Angeles-based social media consultancy In Haus, when asked in an interview how she assesses the success of such efforts.

In fact, the most successful viral moment for the Trump-Vance campaign was an unwelcome one: A few weeks ago, a flood of mocking memes surfaced about the Ohio senator who allegedly admitted in his book that he had used his couch to get a different kind of Congress. He hadn’t. But as with the pre-internet virality that has hurt previous candidates—from Lyndon B. Johnson’s infamous 1964 “Daisy” ad, insinuating that Barry Goldwater would bring nuclear war to the U.S., to George H.W. Bush’s infamous 1988 “Willie Horton” ad, in which he claimed that Michael Dukakis would release dozens of rapists and murderers—the veracity of the claim was less important than the appeal of the message.

The same story played out this weekend when Trump performed Celine Dion’s theme song from Titanic at a campaign rally in Montana, leading to numerous online jokes about how the candidate’s trajectory resembled that of the film. The Harris campaign team was quick to jump on the bandwagon. To throw mud in 2024, a candidate doesn’t have to throw mud; they just have to show up without a towel when someone else does.

But experts say it would be foolish to expect a purely bottom-up approach from the Democratic nominee. “There’s no doubt that organic interest in Kamala Karris is increasing significantly,” said Samuel Woolley, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and longtime project director for propaganda research at the University of Texas’ Center for Media Engagement who is among the leading experts on the origins and impact of influencer content. “But there is certainly inorganic content being pushed as well,” he said when reached this weekend, using the term for content dictated by someone other than the poster.

This is made possible by a number of high-profile, confidential consultancies hired by campaigns, such as the more liberal organization People First. These firms pay for influencers’ content or simply coordinate it without disclosing their involvement.

“The use of influencers has become common practice in political campaigns, and Harris is very adept at doing so,” Woolley said. Actually identifying what is paid content, let alone stopping it, is extremely difficult; social media companies have shown little interest in disclosing or preventing these arrangements, while the FEC has been reluctant to regulate them like traditional political ads.

Even purely organic content can be difficult to track, as every moment of origin leads to something that was there before (you could even say it didn’t fall out of a coconut tree). In fact, Charli XCX’s contribution himself wasn’t the beginning, but a reaction to a variety of organic memes already on TikTok, and accompanied Harris’ speeches with Charli tracks. (The fact that all of this is directed against the legislative back-and-forth of a TikTok ban is, by the way, its own form of viral deliciousness.)

All of this meme content is reminiscent of old forms of media momentum generation from the 20th century. But it’s also different from them. While “I Like Ike” catapulted Eisenhower to the presidency with a Roy O. Disney jingle and an “everybody’s doing it” vibe, “Kamala IS Brat” has yet to prove that it can hold up until the election begins, let alone influence voting behavior then.

“Social media virality usually only works for a political campaign if there is a bridge to the issues – to something substantive,” says social media consultant Stahl. “Otherwise, it’s just a lot of momentum that goes nowhere.” (Some of the first polls after the viral wave show significant increases for Harris, but a causal link is hard to prove.)

It would be tempting to see a Harris victory in November as a new day, a passing of the baton from a single controlled spectacle to the unruly shards of thousands of dance remixes — as if the lime-green cool of a meme were replacing the irresistible orange of a showman’s sun.

Conversely, a Trump victory would be proof of the persistence of this form of reality.

Of course, voting is more complicated than that, and such conclusions would be superficial. Still, American media culture rarely brings such a sweeping transition into a new era, let alone a national election with two candidates on such opposite sides of their borders. Whatever happens in November—or next week—a new media landscape has emerged. And now that it has happened, politics may never be perceived the same way again.